Hedwig Gorski - Career

Career

Her public career began in New Orleans illustrating for the infamous NOLA Express underground newspaper during 1973 and hawking the new issues on the corner. The archives of NOLA Express are now housed in the University of Connecticut. Gorski and Charles Bukowski are two of the most notable contributors to the NOLA Express. There, she befriended Delta blues musician Babe Stovall and often kept him company while he performed for tourists in Jackson Square receiving tips into his open guitar case. A video of them at New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was made but lost.

Soon after moving to Austin, she divorced and began her poetry and theater careers in earnest by falling into the "tmospheric landscape of the town that summoned and intoxicated so many beloved . . . artists of the time toward intense self-actualization." She completed, produced, and directed a one-act play script with the title Booby, Mama! that is an inventive form she named "neo-verse drama." The art memoir of the production states that the verse play was based on a conceptual art cut-up form of writing made famous by William Burroughs. The memoir titled Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street details the events in 1978 that are described as the birth of performance poetry as an American regional avant-garde joining the activity of the body to the psychic power of utterance and intent.

The conceptual process ... seems impossible to pull off. There was no money, and it used 'found' text and 'street' actors ... filled with existential angst living on the fringes of society.

She never claimed close ties to the Feminist Movement, but feminists reportedly consider her work to contain powerful statements about the disparity caused by race and gender in the United States. The images in her poetry are womanly and challenge what is politically correct according to the feminist dictum of the time, and they reflect a protest against the complacency and inaction of artists and non-conformists. She had close ties with Gloria E. Anzaldúa, whose book Borderlands/La Frontera is considered a major work in Chicana feminist theory, Ricardo Sanchez, and Raul Salinas, often performing with them at Resistencia Bookstore and elsewhere. During the Annual Polish American Historical Association (PAHA) conference in Washington, D.C. in 2008, Gorski read from “Mexico Solo,” a long prose poem that she used to introduce how Polish Americans are more closely related to all hyphenated minority cultures than to the majority American WASP culture.

On the conference panel, Polish American poets Stephen Lewandowski and Joseph Lisowski discussed how blatant discrimination and negative stereotyping circulated by Polish jokes plagued their childhoods. She calls these persecuted groups "invisible minorities" in the United States because they are often of European heritage. Gorski’s writing and career aligns with the struggles of all disadvantaged groups suffering from the hidden class warfare inside American society, and for this she has been called the “American Mayakovsky” from whom her motto "poetry is a hammer" is adapted.